‘Fair Play’ is sharp corporate drama
Imagine you’ve found the love of your life, you can’t keep your hands off each other and the future seems as bountiful as a Taylor Swift payday. But here’s the catch: both of you work at a hyper-competitive Manhattan hedge fund so ruthless that it makes Waystar Royco on “Succession” look like a food bank.
No one can know about your romancebut if they do, the knives will come out and backs will be stabbed. Then throw in one of you getting a promotion that the other wanted, and love is slaughtered at the altar of ambition and one of you ends up in the company president’s office barking like a dog.
That’s the basic premise of director/writer Chloe Domont’s finely tuned workplace drama “Fair Play,” showing at iPic Houston and then streaming on Netflix starting Oct. 6.
Alden Ehrenreich (“Oppenheimer,” “Cocaine Bear”) and Phoebe Dynevor (“Bridgerton”) are Luke and Emily, ambitious hedge-fund analysts who have been having a secret fling that leads to a marriage proposal. But when a coveted slot as a portfolio manager opens, Luke and Emily find that it’s hard to keep romance alive when advancing one’s career is at stake.
Domont, whose previous work in television on such shows as “Suits” and “Billions,” knows her way around the quirks of office politics and a toxic workplace.
As smart as Domont’s script is about workplace emotional violence and a relationship in the throes of collapse, it wouldn’t reach the screen with such force without Dynevor, who comes across like a younger Emily Blunt, and Ehrenreich. Their volatile, combustible chemistry is what fuels the often explosive “Fair Play.”